Easy way to transfer notes from one project to another?

Question

I’ve got some NT exegetical checking notes in Projects A and B. I’d like to transfer these notes to my own “consultant’s” notes project which is tied to the Greek source language text ( “Heb/Grk - Biblia Hebraica/UBS Greek New Testament”).

Is there a convenient way to do this that doesn’t involve cutting and pasting individual notes from the notes repositories of Projects A and B into my consultant’s notes project?

Thank you.

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Answer 1

The easiest way to copy notes is to copy the Notes_{userName}.xml files from the source project into the other project. However, this will not update the note references for differences in versification.

If you want them to update to changes in versification, the only other way is to re-create them or click the Multi button when editing each note.

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Comments

@F.R.: Thank you for your suggestion. What if I already have a Notes_{userName}.xml file in the target directory?

Thanks.

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Answer 2

If you already have a file, that gets much trickier.

The following requires knowledge of XML files. Before you do the following, I’d strongly suggest marking a point in project history in case something goes wrong.

To “merge” the two files, you can open the file from the source project and copy everything inside the <CommentList> element and paste it at the bottom of the <CommentList> element in the file from the destination project. That should be safe to do.

Also, I forgot to mention before that any note tags being used in the source project will not carry over to the new project and the copied notes may take on some of the note tags being used in the destination project if the internal IDs match.

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Comments

Thank you, F.R.! This sounds like a very fun project for this weekend. I love to tweak things till I break them (as long as I can come back to this forum for help if I do indeed break something).

I’ll take the precautions you suggest.

The versification shouldn’t pose problems, and I think the note tags thing should be a big deal, either. I mainly just want to get all this information into a single project notes file that I can consult later.

Again, I appreciate your help.

-anon059953

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Answer 3

I would also suggest you copy the Note file to a backup location before you start editing it. That way if you corrupt the file you can put the back up in

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Answer 4

Thank you, F.R. and anon848905,

This looked like too much fun to put off, so I cleared my inbox and jumped on it.

I follow the suggestions from both of you, and it worked just fine. I’m very happy with the results. The verses match up properly so that I now see comments from three different projects (two language projects and one personal consultant notes project) all in the same place.

Each of you please have a cup of coffee on me. We’ll settle up after Matt. 24:14.

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Answer 5

O.K., here’s an additional question. Are the Notes_{userName}.xml files from Paratext 7.5 projects compatible with Paratext 8? I have a number of notes stored on two langugage projects in Paratext 7.5. It would be doubly delightful to get those merged with my more recent work.

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Comments

anon059953:

Are the Notes_{userName}.xml files from Paratext 7.5 projects compatible with Paratext 8?

No, the format is different and is not compatible, sorry. That’s one of the reason files were renamed in Paratext 8 (to reiterate that the formats of the files changed).

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anon291708:

No, the format is different and is not compatible, sorry.

How hard would it be for one of us to write a program that would convert 7.5 Notes files to v8?

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The simple way to convert notes to Paratext 8 format would be do migrate the project. You can then copy the notes. If you don’t want the project in PT8 you could then delete it, but since we expect to migrate all of our projects to PT8 by the end of this year it seems like something you would want to do.

If it is a shared project then obviously you must get everyone to do the migration. However, you could create a “dummy” project in PT7, copy your notes to it, migrate it (registration not needed if the project is not shared), and get the notes that way.

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Answer 6

Outside of Paratext, I think it would be quite a bit of work. The conversion of most of that data is fairly straightforward (mostly converting <Field> elements into named elements and moving some elements into attributes), but you’d also have to change languages to be based on language-code instead of language-name which would be more difficult to get right.

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Comments

But could a program make the data conversion (conversion of elements and moving elements into attributes) and then the user handle the language-code and language-name changes in a simple interactive dialog?

I’m interesting in something like this because several years ago I contributed exegetical checking notes to two long books (John and Romans) for a project that apparently didn’t include notes in the migration from PT7.5 to PT8. Now that I’ve got all my notes consolidated in the more recent PT8 projects I’ve been checking, it would be great to be able to add my notes from the PT7.5 project.

Thanks for any ideas.

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anon059953:

But could a program make the data conversion (conversion of elements and moving elements into attributes) and then the user handle the language-code and language-name changes in a simple interactive dialog?

Yes, that could be done, but, like @anon848905, I would suggest getting the notes from PT8, instead.

anon059953:

…for a project that apparently didn’t include notes in the migration from PT7.5 to PT8.

A project’s notes should not have been deleted when moving to 8. Did the notes just go missing after the migration or did something else happen to them (e.g. some user deleted the files)?

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